If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Watched the classic episode Pyramid of Mars. They were doing an overview of Tom Baker plus this episode. I missed the first part but caught the rest of it. No surprise, I really enjoyed it. Tom Baker was always "The" Doctor Who for me. He was the star when I first started watching it, so nostalgia figures into that alot.

My mom wants me to hold onto the retrospective until she can see it, so I haven't watched it yet. But Tom Baker was "The" Doctor for me as well because of his behavior and his absolute alien-ness.

Darth Vader is becoming the Mickey Mouse of Star Wars.

"In Brooklyn, a castle, is where dwell I"

The use of a lightsaber does not make one a Jedi, it is the ability to not use it.

Watched the classic episode Pyramid of Mars. They were doing an overview of Tom Baker plus this episode. I missed the first part but caught the rest of it. No surprise, I really enjoyed it. Tom Baker was always "The" Doctor Who for me. He was the star when I first started watching it, so nostalgia figures into that alot.

I recently saw that serial, and thought I recognized a name in the credits. Turns out it was the guy that played Admiral Ozzel.

I quite liked this episode, it was fun and bouncy with a real message it didn't cram at the screen all at once, so it had time to breath and live in the moments. Diana Rigg was excellent here, playing a crone with a superiority complex that got to do big stuff at the end was great, appreciating her daughter not forgiving her was icing on that cake. And her daughter was an interesting character as well, playing off The Doctor as her own Frankenstein's monster. It was nice of them to write characters for Diana Rigg and her daughter to work together. The Doctor and Clara got to affect an accent which was excellent, and they weren't too clever with each other, nor was Clara especially clever without justification. This reminded me of an original Doctor Who episode and for once could have gone on longer like those did, spread out the threats and dangers and character interactions across 2 episodes. The final reveal of the sad-faced tiny leech-puppet worked for me, as did Ada killing the hell out of it. It reminded me of the interaction of the Great Intelligence during the Snowman episode, except not as overboard. Honestly, I'm glad they didn't overplay the leech, didn't have him talk or communicate obviously, leaving us to wonder if Diana Rigg's character was the real villain in her quest to find perfection and destroy the rest of the world. TV.com and IGN argued that this episode was "Doctor lite", but I dunno, the guy is only out for 15 minutes and then the rest is him and his pals. They said it was "Sherlock-y" too because it was written by Mark Gatiss, but aside from an overly-clever graphic and the silliness of the flashback movie, there was no mystery solved, no quiet moments, no big turnabouts.

Both sites suggested Madame Vastra and her gang get their own spinoff show, I disagree thoroughly. This was yet again another example of Madame Vastra not doing anything, not solving anything, just sitting and listening to anecdotal evidence and then sending in her cronies. Strax and Jenny were more entertaining than usual, even if Strax's material was rote, and Vastra was more expressive and involved as a character, but still not smart or deep or terribly wise. Shrugging off Team Vastra's question to the Doctor about Clara worked for me, he has no answers and is sick of explaining, but I don't think he's stopped looking for them, he even was taking her right to the "scene of the crime" as it were, London 1893 where her "other" version had just died.The stuff with Clara's nanny work felt forced, no setup at all, just jump into the concept. For some reason they had a Transformers G1 Galvatron in their kitchen, Clara even played with it for a moment. A lot of fans are 'shipping The Doctor and Clara out there, but IMO nothing The Doctor has done is suggesting love with Clara, and she seems to have no attachment to anybody really, she just seems to enjoy flirting. Ugh, no, not the Cybermen, they're so boring! At least there's some real assimilation going on, for once.

Darth Vader is becoming the Mickey Mouse of Star Wars.

"In Brooklyn, a castle, is where dwell I"

The use of a lightsaber does not make one a Jedi, it is the ability to not use it.

This may have been the worst episode I've ever seen, including the '96 tv movie. A big part of the problem is the execution, it looked cheap and the Cybermen once again are boring dolts, the directing felt miles away from the content, and it just didn't deliver on the ideas - the comical castle alone just completely missed every opportunity, and it didn't even succeed at what it was going for. A lot of the acting was pretty bad too, although none of the bad acting compared to the two kids' acting, that was unbearable. The effects also looked surprisingly awful.

The writing side was pretty weak too, and I was sorry to see it was Neil Gaiman's fault. This was as opposite The Doctor's Wife as it gets, none of the new characters had any life except "Porridge" and even that got undermined at the end. It felt like it wanted to be an old serial version with the 3 or 4 hours those stories had to really flesh out ideas and characters. The Cybermen are rewritten to be something more deadly, and yet still they are inconsistent and derivative of Star Trek's the Borg rather than the Cybermen this time around, and despite being cyber"men" their bodies seemed not to need human flesh at all, what with detachable hands and heads attacking left and right, Cybermites infecting human flesh, etc.. And what was the cause of this regeneration? First they claim they needed child brains and infected our obnoxious kiddies, then they already had scores and scores of Cybermen awaiting attack underground that were already upgraded. They zip around like the Flash minus actual leg movement at first, then they just trudge normally the rest of the episode. The endgame move was a total deus ex machina, what was the point of this episode if they're just going to bomb the planet and beam away easily no matter what? We had people die simply because Porridge didn't want to go back to being the Emperor until the last minute, is that really the best they can come up with? And the Doctor's internal struggle ended up flat and similarly cheaty, there's supposed to be an argument between the Doctor's emotional personality and the Cyberinfection's unemotional one, yet the Cyber strategist was crazy emotional, yelling and proverbially stroking his mustache when he saw the upper hand.I didn't find Clara in any way compelling here, she was too often flip and didn't really seem to know anything to back that up, she put her faith in the Doctor and yet he didn't save her, and she ended up nearly dooming the universe with that stupid move with the bomb's flashlight-shaped trigger. And the flirting, holy crap is that stale. In the end, I enjoyed Warwick Davis' performance quite a bit, and that is literally it. Nothing else made sense (the opening scene where the kids were sure they were on the moon and yet when we saw from their perspective it was clearly a ride), it was horribly acted and scripted and directed and produced, and the fun ideas underpinning the planet never got to shine or even look like they existed at all.

Darth Vader is becoming the Mickey Mouse of Star Wars.

"In Brooklyn, a castle, is where dwell I"

The use of a lightsaber does not make one a Jedi, it is the ability to not use it.

This hasn't exactly been my favorite season. There were many short comings and few redeeming episodes. The final episode was not what I had hoped for, but not as bad as it could have been. I can only hope it feeds well into the 50th anniversary.

I will always be a die hard Who fan, but I hope it gets better. Things just aren't the same since Russell T. Davies left, Stephen Moffat just doesn't seem up to the task. :-/

I'm not exactly surprised by this, there was a long break, and Matt Smith has felt out of gas this last season, like he's checked out as an actor portraying this character, ready to move onto different stuff.

But it does take us into the Doctor's 12th incarnation, and the character only has 12 regenerations (13 incarnations total) so this really gets us close to either needing a Master-esque cheat, or an actor who can survive more than a few years in the role - I thought that was the intention with Matt Smith, that unlike Tennant and Eccleston, Smith was going to stick around more than 3 years, but I guess not.

I wonder if current showrunner Steven Moffat is going to go with him, or stick with the series. I haven't really enjoyed Moffat's run as showrunner, but I do recognize his passion for the material as he himself is a huge fan.

As for the series 7 finale, I didn't like it, I had a long post discussing what did and didn't work, but with the announcement of Smith leaving it doesn't even seem like worth posting anymore, the season already felt deflated and now this news takes the rest of the air out of this one.

Darth Vader is becoming the Mickey Mouse of Star Wars.

"In Brooklyn, a castle, is where dwell I"

The use of a lightsaber does not make one a Jedi, it is the ability to not use it.

I understand Matt Smith will be playing Dr. Venom in G.I.Joe: Regurgitation three years from now, complete with a battle-armored figure that looks nothing like him and comes with five points of articulation.